Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade

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Salon Futura #6

The latest issue of Salon Futura is now up online, with a special Valentine’s Day theme in which I contribute the article “1778 Ways to Say I Love You”, about the Japanese science fiction author Taku Mayumura.

Meanwhile, I staggered back into London at dawn this morning on the sleeper from Glasgow, where yesterday’s storylining workshop produced the utterly bonkers Waxing Moon – the tale of a family of werewolves (plus one hapless were-iguana), whose tanning and waxing salon is under threat from business rivals at a vampire hat shop. The end result was a sort of supernatural pastiche of the Brady Bunch, with a werewolf and a vampire girl falling in love while rehearsing the school play Romeo & Juliet in which the Romeo and the Juliet genuinely do come from two contending aristocratic houses. It is a shame that we shall never see a real-life TV show in which orange-skinned vampires dominate at the high-school fencing club, or where the super-cool, super-vain vampire elder brother is a boy called Gary, who glitters. With a music teacher called Shump Jarking.

As with earlier incarnations at the Irish Film Institute and Screen Academy Wales, it’s always fascinating to see the shows that people come up with when they are given the rules that professional writers have to follow. Waxing Moon joins Decontaminators, Hattie Bast: Mummy’s Girland Choc Shock among the alternate-world TV show ideas that have come up in a couple of years of the storylining workshop. What made Waxing Moon different and rather precious is that the storyliners were all teenagers themselves.